On Reading Breaking the Spell
I am a fan of philosopher (and noted atheist) Daniel Dennett. I like reading his books, I like his style, I like his writing. Last year I read a couple more of his books. So far nothing has excited me more than Darwin's Dangerous Idea, which I thought absolutely brilliant, but they're still pretty good. Whether I like his arguments or not, his metaphors, examples, and ways of putting them together I find stimulating.
I just finished up the long-suffering book note for Dennett's Breaking the Spell : Religion as a Natural Phenomenon (New York : Viking Penguin, 2006, 448 pages). With someone like Dennett, it's not surprising that I had a bunch of leftover excerpts to quote. Here's the bunch:
(Sperm are like e-mail spam, so cheap to make and deliver that a vanishingly small return rate is sufficient to underwrite the project.) [p. 59]
—–
Elephants– and baboons and other African animals–have been known to get falling-down drunk eating fermenting fruit from marula trees, and there is evidence that elephants will travel great distances to arrive at the marula trees just when their fruits ripen. It seems that the fruit ferments in their stomachs when yeast cells resident on the fruit undergo a population explosion, consuming the sugar and excreting carbon dioxide and alcohol. The alcohol happens to create the same sort of pleasurable effects in the elephants' brains that it does in ours. [p. 66]
—–
So science, and the technology it spawns, has been explosively practical, an amplifier of human powers in almost every imaginable dimension, making us stronger, faster, able to see farther in both space and time, healthier, more secure, more knowledgeable about just about everything, including our own origins–but that doesn't mean it can answer all questions or serve all needs.Science doesn't have the monopoly on truth, and some of its critics have argued that it doesn't even live up to its advertisements as a reliable source of objective knowledge. I am going to deal swiftly with this bizarre claim, for two reasons: I and others have dealt with it at length elsewhere [references not given here], and, besides everybody knows better–whatever people may say in the throes of academic battle. They reveal this again and again in their daily lives. I have yet to meet a postmodern science critic who is afraid to fly in an airplane because he doesn't trust the calculations of the thousands of aeronautical engineers and physicists who have demonstrated and exploited the principles of flight, nor have I ever heard of a devout Wahhabi who prefers consulting his favorite imam about the proven oil reserves in Saudi Arabia over the calculations of geologists. If you buy and install a new battery in your mobile phone, you expect it to work, and will be mightily surprised, and angry if it doesn't. You are quite ready to bet your life on the extraordinary reliability of the technology that surrounds you, and you don't even give it a second thought. Every church trusts arithmetic to keep track accurately of the receipts in the collection plate, and we all calmly ingest drugs from aspirin to Zocor, confident that there is ample scientific evidence in support of the hypothesis that these are safe and effective. [pp. 370–371]
—–
"Pray: To ask that the laws of the universe be annulled in behalf of a single petitioner confessedly unworthy." [Quoting, on p. 270, Ambrose Bierce, from The Devil's Dictionary]
—–
[After talking about Marxists who inculcated Marxism into their children: red-diaper babies.]Today we have a similar phenomenon brewing on the religious right: the inevitability of the End Days, or the Rapture, the coming Armageddon that will separate the blessed from the damned in the final Day of Judgment. Cults and prophets proclaiming the imminent end of the world have been with us for several millennia, and it has been another sour sort of fun to ridicule them the morning after, when they discover that their calculations were a little off. But, just as with the Marxists, there are some among them who are working hard to "hasten the inevitable," not merely anticipating the End Days with joy in their hearts, but taking political action to bring about the conditions they think are the prerequisites for that occasion. And these people are not funny at all. They are dangerous, for the same reason that red-diaper babies are dangerous: they put their allegiance to their creed ahead of their commitment to democracy, to peace, to (earthly) justice–and to truth. If push comes to shove, some of them are prepared to lie and even to kill, to do whatever it takes to help bring what they consider celestial justice to those they consider the sinners. Are they a lunatic fringe? They are certainly dangerously out of touch with reality, but it is hard to know how many they are.16 Are their numbers growing? Apparently. Are they attempting to gain positions of power and influence in the governments of the world? Apparently. Should we know all about this phenomenon? We certainly should. [pp. 397–398]
16 A recent poll in Newsweek (May 24, 2004) claimed that 55 percent of American think that the faithful will be taken up to heaven in the Rapture and 17 percent believe the world will end in their lifetimes. If this is even close to being accurate, it suggests that End Timers in the first decade of the twenty-first century outnumber the Marxists of the 19340s through the 1950s by a wide margin. But what percentage of these adherents are prepared to take any steps, overt or covert, to hasten the imagined Armageddon is anybody's guess, I fear to say.